Not every story is about seeing yourself in it. Sometimes it’s about learning to see other people too.

@tearyeyedcat this was beautifully written, thank you for adding it!

i love you female characters who make selfish choices they know will be bad for everyone. i love you female characters who think they're making the right choice but make things worse. i love you female characters who are making the right choice but noone else understands it.

this dudebro in my english class said that ophelia deserved to die because “she led hamlet on” and my teacher threw her book against the wall

your teacher’s aim sucks

hey so casting one of the only minority characters as a ‘mean girl’ or a bully or a villain isn’t actually progressive. the trope of portraying minority characters as having power and abusing it is not actually an improvement over portraying minorities as powerless & secondary (or just excluding them completely). 

just the existence of minority characters isn’t enough, creators need to learn to use their goddamn brains and pay attention to how they portray these characters, please.

Did… did people forget that bisexuality doesn’t mean attracted to only one gender?

Its been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled

Same reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up an’ said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DC’s animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males don’t/can’t/shouldn’t like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that it’s popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titans— two million viewers for new episodes will do that— and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.

This is so fucked up.

To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.

In a nutshell, it’s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.

This is why children’s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they’ve decided to use is “boys versus girls”.

Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That’s market segregation in action.

The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they’re viewed as “stealing” the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully “owns” it.

This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It’s not just artificial, it’s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying “this is the ways it’s always been” or “this is just what the market wants”, they’re lying through their teeth - this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.

(Interestingly, the reverse isn’t always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collector’s market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)

It gets worse.

Paul Dini, a writer/producer said this on a podcast: “ That’s the thing, you know I hate being Mr. Sour Grapes here, but I’ll just lay it on the line: that’s the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, it’s like, ‘we need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys’—this is the network talking—’one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as boys, but right there.’”

Cartoon network and Warner brothers deliberately made the conscious decision to dumb down their female characters because they want to push female viewers away. In fact, Tower Prep was cancelled because it had too many female viewers because the writers made too many well written female characters.

So shitty representation of girls isn’t something that just happens. It’s the result of deliberate planning just so the execs can make more money.

And it’s not just cartoon network. I mean, why do you think Nick fucked over Korra so badly? Remember them telling Bryke they didn’t want a female Avatar? Why do you think there are no Korra figurines or action figures?

Source: http://www.themarysue.com/warner-bros-animation-girl-market/

So tired of female characters being disowned by their fandoms for having a romantic storyline (with a male); seasons and chapters worth of development get erased and sneered at because she dares to want some dick. Is there anything more boring than shaming women for wanting love in their lives? Jfc. There’s no cliche more in need of retiring.

Sometimes I see people be like "I hate when female characters have conflict why can't they just all be BEST FRIENDS like in real life!" Like damn I'm glad your experiences with other women have been so great but sometimes--like even outside of the bullying, the abuse, etc--sometimes two women will just have different personalities and will not like each other that much and it's not necessarily sexist it's just how people are sometimes.

STOP. ATTACKING. FEMALE. CHARACTERS. JUST. BECAUSE. THEY. INTERFERE. WITH. YOUR. NONCANON. GAY. SHIP.

Happy International Women’s Day ♀

Unfortunately, when a lot of fans dunk on a character for reasons I find silly, especially if they willfully misread the text to do so, the fandom punching bag then becomes my favorite character. I could have liked them a normal amount, but the constant bad takes annoyed me and now I am unstoppable.

if someone tells you that your OC or your fave is a Mary Sue, tell them they shouldn’t complain about a character when they can’t even get their name right

when they try to explain that a Mary Sue is an unrealistically powerful or capable character, tell them that you think the term they are looking for is “main character” and that all forms of storytelling have abundant examples of them

if they’re still going at that point, just block them because they are clearly incapable of taking hints

Male Character: *fucks up 100 times* Fans: “No one is perfect. He’s flawed so there is room for development!”

Female Character: *is not the epitome of perfection* Fans: “Sorry. I just hate this character.”

Male Character: *is perfect*

Fans: It’s an awesome power fantasy!  It’s so inspiring!

Female Character: *is above average in any skill*

Fans: mmm… it’s fine I guesssss but why does she have to be such a mary sue??? just asking because I’m not sure it’s realistic…. hmmm…

This becomes 600% more depressing when you remember the majority of fandom participants are women.

Internalized Misogyny

-Brittney Jones, The Medicine of Hope (via octobermoe)

Something that bothers me about a certain type of Femslash

There’s this idea in femslash that “exotic” features are the domain of “interesting” white women who are supposed to stand out of a group of “traditionally white” characters.  At the most everyone is a “tan”, but she’s going to have almond eyes, or a certain build, or a darker skin tone that makes her different (but not enough for them to admit she’s probably not white).  

They use terms that they know exclude many WoC (they usually assume we can’t be blond, brunette, or redhead…and the “black” hair they think we have doesn’t get the poetic treatment that the “jet black hair” characters they decide are white get).  So they can have their “blond + brunette, light vs. “dark”, feminine vs. masculine” without having to deal with any real nuance.  

I’m tired of fiction that treats WoC poorly, especially when its femslash.  We’re women too, but you wouldn’t know it from how overwhelming white femslash circles can be.  Like, why is it that people who can find any justification to pair two white women (who often hate each other) suddenly can’t figure out what to do if one of those women becomes black?  Suddenly writing her features out leaves a bad taste in their mouth and the relationship just isn’t viable anymore. But they don’t want to admit this is because they’re writing for a certain gaze.  They’re too invested in seeing themselves as morally superior to sexists who only write for the male gaze that they fail to address how their writing reflects the white gaze in very problematic ways that wind up erasing (and/or fetishizing) a lot of women.  I HATE that.  

I swear, if I find another femslash story where the brunette has my skin tone and my features but is written as white I’m going to flip.  Don’t erase me but then use my features so that a white character can “contrast” with their significant other in a way that allows you to still feel comfortable.  I’ve had enough of that crap used against me offline in LGBTQ circles, I don’t want to deal with it in my fantasy or my sci-fi or any of the fanworks that derive from it. 

Queer women DO exist, and no we aren’t all a part of cisgender, pale skinned, “traditionally white blond” and “exotically white” brunette combinations.  Write what you want, and yeah, part of this can be blamed on the lack of WoC in these shows and movies (especially in regards to Black, Indigenous, and Asian women, though this can be applied to WoC as a whole).  But fanfic (or even original fiction) doesn’t require you to accept the same limitations that the source material has, you CHOOSE to write things this way, and its your responsibility to unpack that if you want to fix it.